Blog

  • New York ComicCon and a video

    Though I hadn’t planned on it originally, it looks like I’ll be attending the New York Comic Con this year, randomly enough as a guest of Archie Comics. After ComicCon in San Diego, they have become interested in my research, especially related to education, so they’ve invited me to come. I’m only planning to go…

  • Predispositions for drawing

    A recent comment to another blog post raised some interesting issues so I figured I should bump it up to a full discussion here. The basic issue is whether drawing in a realistic style (proper anatomy, shading, depth, etc) is somehow antithetical to our cognitive predispositions for drawing. I’ve argued before that drawing involves the…

  • Gestures in comics

    A doubleshot of reviews**: Fein, Ofer, & Kasher, Asa (1996). How to do things with words and gestures in comics Journal of Pragmatics, 26 (6), 793-808 DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(96)00023-9 This study looked at the role of gestures in comics (specifically, those in the European comic Asterix). The study had people interpret the meanings of both panels…

  • Review: Brain damage and ordering of panels in comic strips

    I recently reviewed an older study of brain damaged individual’s comprehension of final-panel jokes in comic strips. Here’s another paper that explores brain damage and the ordering of panels in sequences. Participants were asked to arrange scrambled parts of a story into their accurate order, and the authors compared the abilities of numerous types of…

  • Back to school…

    School is starting up next week, which means I suddenly have lots more stuff appearing on my plate. I’m still plugging away at my theoretical paper (now at 140 pages and growing!) as well as preparing a few other papers for submission to journals. Once I finish that paper, I’ll be jumping back into the…

  • New Essay: Extra! Extra! Semantics in Comics

    I’m excited to say that I’ve just had another article published. This one is entitled “Extra! Extra! Semantics in Comics!: The conceptual structure of Chicago Tribune advertisements” and appears in the latest edition of the Journal of Pragmatics. Here’s the abstract: Recently, increasing attention is turning to comics as a graphic domain using similar cognitive…

  • Reading comics for work

    I admit it, I have a pretty sweet job. Among the paper writing, class teaching, and data gathering (all fun), it is true that at least a portion of my time is devoted to reading comics. A lot of comics. I end up combing through hundreds of pages of comics just to find examples that…

  • Lightbulbs over the head actually do give insight!

    A friend of mine and fellow grad student in the Tufts Psychology Department (Mike Slepian) recently had a paper come out that’s been getting some press lately. Interestingly enough, it relates to the common cartoony emblem of the lightbulb above the head. This symbol is a conventional sign for “inspiration” in comics and cartoons, so…

  • New Book: Meaning and the Lexicon

    It slipped my mind to post this a few months ago, but my advisor Ray Jackendoff has just a had a new book come out that is worth picking up entitled Meaning and the Lexicon. It features a collection of his papers tracing the development of his theories over the past 35 years. Pertinent to…

  • Picasso’s Ghost

    I’ve got some other posts in the works, but in the meantime an old friend of my father’s made this fun video about Picasso, Cezanne, and the inspirations of great art. Enjoy!